Oolaboo

Oolaboo is a Dutch hair and skin care brand founded in 2011 by the brothers Richard and Jeroen Wilmink [10]. The company, Oolaboo BV, is based in Zutphen in the Netherlands. It sells professional hair care, skin care and a wider lifestyle range to salons and directly to consumers, and it builds its identity around a single idea, expressed in its tagline "Linking inner & outer beauty": that the condition of skin and hair depends as much on what a person eats as on what they apply.

Two of its products have won first place at the Dutch Beauty Awards: a skin care programme in 2021 and a plant-based hair care collection in 2026. It remains independent and active, with new launches reported in the trade press as recently as June 2026.

Both founders came from the hairdressing trade. They grew up in a hairdressing family, and the company names their mother, a hairdresser, as an early influence [4]. Richard and Jeroen Wilmink each started out as hairdressers before moving into careers in the wider cosmetics industry, and their shared ambition was to develop a cosmetics brand of their own.

According to the company, the idea behind Oolaboo took shape while the world, as it puts it, focused on beauty on the outside. They became interested in beauty "from within", and the company's English about page states that 70% of skin condition is determined by the nutrients a person consumes [2]. The current Dutch version of the same page softens and broadens this to "up to 70%" of the condition of both skin and hair. The claim is the company's own; no study is named in support of it.

The brothers realised their plan in 2011, when they founded Oolaboo [2]. A 2021 profile in the Dutch beauty magazine BeautyJournaal described them as having a holistic view of beauty, in which appearance is shaped by diet, by the products a person uses and by how they feel in themselves. The same article noted their fascination with Japanese and Chinese treatment methods, an influence that still runs through the brand's salon offering.

The brand is owned and operated by Oolaboo BV, a company registered in Zutphen. No parent group, outside investor or acquisition has been documented, and the brand is still associated with its two founders. In 2026 the company's communications manager, quoted in the trade press, was Ellen Wilmink.

Oolaboo's product development rests on a principle the founders repeat in several places: everything used in and on the body should be safe and as natural as possible, because "what is not safe enough for your mouth, we do not use for your skin and hair." The company lists four core values: natural, safe, results and experience.

Its stated mission is to create professional hair and skin care that combines luxury, effectiveness and responsibility. In practice the brand positions itself first as a salon brand. Its professional website describes Oolaboo as a deliberate choice for salons that want to pair premium professional hair and skin care with respect for nature, innovation and craftsmanship. Alongside the products, the company offers treatments that it says are inspired by Japanese and Chinese methods, delivered by salon staff it calls Oolaboo specialists, who are trained in the brand's philosophy.

Over time the range has moved well beyond shampoo and face cream. The company now describes Oolaboo as a lifestyle brand, and the catalogue reflects that: besides hair and skin care it includes body care, toothpaste, dietary supplements, an "inner beauty" tea and an ambiance line of perfume, scented candles, room spray and reed diffusers. The brand also publishes its own online magazine, Blooooming.

### Hair care

Hair care is the brand's original trade. The range is organised into named systems, each built around a signature ingredient or purpose, among them Blushy Truffle, Bouncy Bamboo, Mighty Rice, Moisty Seaweed, Straight Baobab, Curlicious, Glam Former, Therapeutic Green Tea and Solluxe, a line aimed at protecting hair from the sun. A Super Foodies line, built around ingredients such as matcha, spans both hair and skin. For salons, the professional shop also carries Ecolorgy, a professional hair colour range sold as Ecolorgy+ and Ecolorgy semi.

A common thread across the shampoos and conditioners is an ingredient the brand calls the Quinoa Protein Complex, which BeautyJournaal reported is included in all of them [10]. The same review relayed a brand promise that five treatments make hair up to 26% stronger than ordinary care; that figure is Oolaboo's own. The reviewer tested three products on bleached hair, the Blushy Truffle Brilliant Platinum Hair Bath (a silver shampoo that also contains Italian white truffle), the Bouncy Bamboo Reconstructor and the Moisty Seaweed 24 Benefits Instant Cure, and reported that her hair became more resilient and easier to style. The magazine also noted that the hair range draws on the brand's background in skin care and treats the scalp as well as the hair.

More recently the brand added Nature as Essence, which it describes as the first professional hair care range that is 100% plant-based [6]. Every product in the collection is stated to be vegan and free of GMOs, PEGs, sulfates, silicones, parabens, colourants and microplastics, and the formulas use a lactobacillus ferment as a natural preservative. The collection is sold without secondary packaging.

### Skin care

The skin care side is at least as broad as the hair range. It is divided into systems such as SMART Aesthetics, Dawn to Dusk, Morning Dew, Truffle Indulgence, Saveguard, Oil Control, Beauty Sleep, Skin Superb, O'dude and Skin Defense DNA Protective, with a Picking Garden line covering body care. The Morning Dew Prebiotic Program, a routine built around prebiotics (ingredients intended to support the skin's natural bacteria), became the brand's first award winner in 2021.

In June 2026 the brand extended its Skin Defense line with the Refresh Crackle Mousse, a cooling mousse for use after sun exposure. Its texture is lightly fizzing and crackles softly on the skin; the formula includes panthenol, sorbitol and a small amount of bitter orange oil. Ellen Wilmink told the trade site Beauty-Pro.nl that the innovation lies less in any new active ingredient than in what she called the "sensory delivery", the combination of texture, sound and feel. She also acknowledged that no separate study had been carried out on the final formula, and that the product's claims rest on the known effects of its individual ingredients [13]. The mousse was launched through the brand's own webshop and its partner salons.

### Ingredient claims

On its English-language about page, the company states that all of its products are free of parabens, sulfates and mineral oils [2]. The current Dutch wording of that page is more general, saying the products are free of harmful substances. The brand describes its products as cruelty-free and says it never tests on animals; no third-party cruelty-free certification, such as Leaping Bunny, is documented. Vegan status is claimed for specific lines, notably Nature as Essence, and the webshop keeps a separate vegan collection rather than describing the full range as vegan.

Oolaboo presents packaging as the main part of its environmental effort. According to the company, its bottles and jars are made from Prevented Ocean Plastic, bio-based plastic or glass, and it aims to cut waste by using fewer ingredients and less packaging [5]. The Nature as Essence collection goes a step further by dropping outer cartons altogether.

The brand has also run a charitable initiative, the Aquam Servo Project, which supports the Dutch foundation Stichting Waterpas in its work on clean drinking water. The project was described in the 2021 BeautyJournaal article; its start date is not stated.

Oolaboo has twice won first place at the Dutch Beauty Awards, a Dutch industry prize judged by a panel of specialist beauty journalists and editors.

At the 36th edition, held on 31 May 2021, the Morning Dew Prebiotic Program took first place in the Made in NL category [12]. Five years later, at the 41st edition on 18 May 2026, the Nature as Essence collection won first place in the category for green hair care (Haarverzorging Groen) [11]. That year's competition drew 270 product entries, and the ceremony took place aboard the Oceandiva in Amsterdam-Noord.

Oolaboo is active. Its most recent visible milestones are the Dutch Beauty Award for Nature as Essence in May 2026 and the launch of the Refresh Crackle Mousse, reported in the trade press on 18 June 2026.

The brand runs two sales channels: a consumer webshop and a separate professional shop for salons, alongside a network of partner salons. The professional site is published in Dutch, German and English. On that site the company states that its products are available in 10 countries and used by 1,865 hairdressers and 763 beauty salons worldwide [4]; the countries are not named, and the figures have not been independently confirmed.